Our business & sustainability

Our business, purpose & values

Arxada focuses on four core end-markets: Human Health and Nutrition, Home and Personal Care, Paints and Coatings and Wood Protection, and provides a broad portfolio of differentiated products and solutions. This is supported by science and innovation capabilities, in-depth regulatory know-how and a proven record in manufacturing and process development.

Arxada has a global footprint spanning 26 production sites and 16 research and development centers; we have a world-leading team of 3,600 employees, serving customers across a wide range of industries.

We innovate to solve, challenge and remove barriers to peak performance. We are passionate about empowering high performance and realizing potential both internally and for our partners and customers. We work together every day to achieve our purpose:

Operating locations

Our purpose centers around the importance of preservation for society and the environment. Preservation can protect and maintain the health and wellbeing of people, improve the longevity and efficacy of vital infrastructure, while supporting the health of our planet.

To help us achieve our purpose, we follow a set of core values that reflect the longstanding commitments of our heritage companies, demonstrate our steadfast commitment to our people and the planet, and exemplify the way we work. These values are timeless and form the foundation of everything we do.

Our products

Preservation is about protecting and maintaining the health and wellbeing of people and improving the longevity and efficacy of vital infrastructure, while supporting the health of our planet. Our broad portfolio of products and services helps our customers to be more efficient, effective and sustainable.

Developing our sustainability strategy

In 2022, our first full year of operations as Arxada, we set the ambition of formalizing a sustainability strategy that can help us ensure we deliver on our purpose in a way that supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through our products, we want to subscribe to more sustainable solutions for the world’s toughest preservation challenges. Within our operations, we want to ensure that we are contributing to a low-carbon specialty chemicals industry and are creating healthy and safe environments for our employees.

Our sustainability strategy enables us to do this by combining forward-thinking ambitions for our products with targets to reduce the environmental and social impact of our operations. In 2022, as part of our strategy development process, we conducted in-depth desktop research and engaged internal and external stakeholders across the globe through a series of interactive workshops and meetings. In addition, we engaged employees and investors, conducting a global customer survey to help inform and guide our strategy and priorities.

The inputs from our research and stakeholder engagements were instrumental in identifying and prioritizing the sustainability issues most important to our business and our key stakeholders. The outcome of this work is refinement and focus on key issues that will drive our sustainability performance forward. We evaluated and synthesized our engagement findings, additional industry research and know-how from senior colleagues to develop a sustainability strategy for 2030, resting on the three pillars of Planet, Preservation and People.

Going forward as a best practice, we will routinely seek input from all stakeholders and continue updating and refining our sustainability approach to reflect stakeholder priorities.

Arxada’s sustainability strategy

[1] From our 2021 baseline.

[2] As per the WBSCD PSA or another 3rd party validated methodology.

[3] Rates are calculated as the number of injuries or incidents in the reporting period x 200,000 / Total hours worked in the reporting period.

[4] Our key suppliers make up approximately 20% of our supplier base and account for approximately 80% of our spend.

[5] Advocacy to advance external science-based decision making that drives sustainable preservation.

[6] Our senior leadership includes the following job roles: Associate Director; Director; Senior Director; Vice President; Senior Vice President; President; and CEO.

Sustainability-Linked Financial Instruments

In a first of its kind for a private equity transaction, the carve-out of Arxada was partially financed through sustainability-linked loan facilities and sustainability-linked bonds (Sustainability-Linked Financial Instruments), with support from our sponsors Bain Capital and Cinven. A Sustainability-Linked Financial Instrument has financial and/or structural characteristics that can vary depending on whether the issuer achieves material, ambitious, pre-determined, regularly monitored and externally verified sustainability objectives. Therefore, Sustainability-Linked Financial Instruments present an additional incentive for the issuer to meet future commitments to improve sustainability in areas considered material to overall business operations.

This is particularly relevant for Arxada as by embedding targets against its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) into Sustainability-Linked Financial Instruments, Arxada has committed to reducing its environmental impact during its early growth stage. Arxada is also ensuring continuous and transparent disclosure of performance on these KPIs, as the company develops.

The adopted KPIs tied to the Sustainability-Linked Financial Instruments are (i) our greenhouse gas (‘‘GHG’’) emissions intensity and (ii) waste intensity with target reductions set from a 2018 baseline.

By intensely focusing our resources to meet the reduction goals, as of the first interim target date of 2022, we have exceeded the goals set on both targets.

A Sustainability-Linked Financing Report will be provided to Investors by Arxada on the progress made against the KPIs of each Sustainability-Linked Financing Instrument.

External verification of our assessment of performance against the KPIs of each Sustainability-Linked Financing Instrument will be conducted on at least an annual basis beginning the fiscal year end 2022. See our assurance statement for our 2022 KPI observation data here.

More information on how we are working to improve our GHG and waste impact and meet our targets can be found in the Planet Pillar content.